Australian
writer and director DavidMichôd, in his debut effort, brings to the screen a
diverting conceptual fictional crime family pic (based on a real bunch
of Aussie criminals from the 1980s) set inMelbourne.
It features a wickedly manipulative benign looking
mum, Janine (Jacki Weaver), whose grown sons--armed
robber Pope Cody (Ben Mendelsohn), in-the-closet frightened
thug DarrenCody (Luke Ford), anddrug dealer CraigCody(Sullivan
Stapleton)--are criminals and she's
the brains behind them. When Janine's quiet estranged
17-year-old grand-son, Joshua Cody (James
Frecheville),
finds his mom dead on the apartment sofa from an
accidental heroine overdose, he contacts granny and
she takes him in. Soon Josh unwittingly gets involved
with their low-level criminal activities, even though
he just wants a place to live in. When the boys' smart
gangster friend and accomplice Baz Brown
(Joel Edgerton), a stable family man, who
invests his money in stocks and wants out of the
rackets, gets bumped off by the same renegade corrupt
cops who were after the wanted armed robber in hiding
Pope, the sleazy deviant Pope arranges for his
weak-minded brothers to retaliate by knocking off, at
random, two cops. That brings in heavy pressure from
the police and the honest Detective Senior Sgt. Nathan
Leckie (Guy Pearce) to question the boys and Josh.
This makes the Pope paranoid that either Josh or his
girlfriend (Laura
Wheelwright) will blab, and under his
twisted leadership the gang makes bad decisions in
dealing with the crises that make things unravel for
the crime family. The film hinges on which direction
will Josh be swayed to join in his struggle for
survival--with the good cop Leskie or with the
affectionate but ruthless matriarch.

It tells a familiar crime
story of an innocent caught in a dangerous situation
and how he learns to fend for himself from his limited
street experience when fearing he can trust no one to
help him out of his bad situation. Despite its
well-worn narrative and that it has nothing new to say
about criminals, troubled youths or cops, it
nevertheless gets fine oddball performances from
Weaver and Mendelsohn
and has a
fresh look and feel that keeps things exciting without
being graphic or sentimental.